he hill after me. It will overtake us soon, and then
I won't take up your time any longer, for I daresay you are going on
some good work."

Again the half-veiled flippancy of her tone jarred upon him and made him
clench his teeth for an instant.

"With the greatest pleasure," he replied, turning and walking with long,
slow strides beside her. His blood was quite cool now, and a great
weight had been lifted from his shoulders.

"It is this way," he went on, speaking as calmly as though he were
addressing an utter stranger. "You know, or perhaps you do not know yet,
that, beautiful and almost arcadian as this place is, there is, I regret
to say, a great deal of poverty and sorrow, and, I am afraid, sin too,
and it is part of our duty at the Retreat to seek this out and do what
we can to relieve it; but there is much of that kind of work which women
can do infinitely better than men, and therefore, when a woman enters
our gates as our guest, we ask her to do what she can to help us."

"I see," she said, more softly and more naturally than she had spoken
before. "It is a very just and a very good condition, and I shall do my
best to fulfil it; indeed, as I suppose I shall some day be Lady of the
Manor here, it will be my duty to do it."

"I am very glad to hear you say so," he said, with a touch of warmth in
his tone, "very glad. And if you like you can begin at once. You see
that little farmhouse up the road yonder. Well, there is not only
sorrow, but sin and shame as well in that house. The old people are most
respectable, and they were once fairly comfortably off before the
agricultural depression ruined them. They are wretchedly poor now, but
they struggle on somehow. About eighteen months ago their daughter went
off to Kidderminster to work in the mills. She said she would get good
wages and send some of them home every week. For some months she did
send them a few shillings, and then what is unfortunately only too
common about here happened. For a long time they lost sight of her, and
last night she came back, starving, with a baby and no husband."

He said this in a perfectly passionless and impersonal tone, just as a
doctor might describe the symptoms of a disease. "If you care to, you
can do a great deal of good there," he went on. "I have just been there.
If you like I will take you in and introduce you."

She stopped and hesitated for a moment. It struck her as such an utter
reversal of their former relati